Domain age

What this check does

Queries the IANA RDAP bootstrap registry to find the right registry server for your TLD, then asks that server for the domain’s creation date. Reports domain age in years and flags new (<6 month) domains.

Why it matters

Google has never confirmed “domain age” as a direct ranking factor, but the effects of an older domain are real: more time to accrue backlinks, more cached pages, more trust signals at every algorithm layer. Brand-new domains start at zero on all of those and need to compensate with stronger on-page signals, clear authorship, and verifiable citations.

The check is informational, not punitive — but if your site is under 6 months old and you’re wondering why rankings are slow, this is part of the answer.

How to fix it

You can’t speed up the calendar. What you can do is make a new domain look credible faster:

1. Lock in trust pages early.

Ship About, Contact, Privacy, and Terms pages before launch. Google’s quality raters and AI agents both look for these as a baseline credibility signal — see the trust pages check.

2. Get verifiable author bios live.

Pair the author byline on each article with a real /authors/<name>/ page that has credentials, photo, and sameAs links to LinkedIn / GitHub / X. This is the single biggest E-E-A-T multiplier for new domains.

3. Submit to Google Search Console immediately.

Verify the domain property (not just URL prefix), submit your XML sitemap, and request indexing on top pages. New domains often take weeks to get crawled organically — Search Console cuts that to days.

4. Build a few credible backlinks.

Three good links beat thirty bad ones for a new domain. Aim for: industry directories, podcast guesting, guest posts on established blogs in your niche, and Wikipedia-class citations if your topic supports them.

5. Use a domain you already own.

If you’re rebranding, redirect the old domain to the new one with 301s and keep the old domain registered. The age advantage transfers to a meaningful degree — see the HTTPS redirect and redirect chains pages for the mechanics.

6. Don’t buy expired domains for shortcut authority.

The “expired domain” SEO market is full of penalized properties. Google has stated explicitly that penalties stick to the domain, not the owner. Use registration anniversaries from a domain you registered yourself, not someone else’s burned reputation.

Look up your own domain age:

# RDAP (preferred — JSON output, the modern replacement for WHOIS)
curl -s https://rdap.org/domain/example.com | jq '.events[] | select(.eventAction=="registration")'

# Old-school WHOIS still works on most TLDs
whois example.com | grep -i "creation date"

Frequently asked questions

Is “domain age” actually used by Google?

Direct: no, Google has said so repeatedly. Indirectly: yes — every signal that correlates with age (backlinks, indexed pages, real-user traffic, time on platform) compounds over time. The age itself is a proxy; the substance is what’s earned during it.

My domain is from 1998 but I just launched the site. Does that help?

A little. Long registration history is a mild trust signal, but Google’s crawlers also see how long there has been real content at the address. A long-registered parking page doesn’t earn the same credit as a long-running active site.

What’s RDAP and why not WHOIS?

WHOIS is the legacy protocol (port 43, free-form text). RDAP is the structured JSON replacement (HTTPS, RFC 9082, machine-readable). RDAP is now the official protocol for gTLDs since 2025; we query it directly for speed and reliability.